Engineered porous borophene with tunable anisotropic properties

Monolayer borophene, a two-dimensional nanostructure, has received much attention due to its high flexibility, excellent elasticity, high strength, and interesting electronic characteristics. However, borophene is highly anisotropic, and therefore programming their anisotropic thermo-mechanical properties is of great interest for a wide range of applications in electronic devices, ion batteries, hydrogen storages, and supercapacitors. To determine the impact of porosity and pore topology on thermo-mechanical properties of porous borophene, non-equilibrium molecular dynamics simulation and finite element approach are adopted. It is found that pore engineering not only effectively controls the thermo-mechanical properties of borophenes but also can offer a strategy to transform an anisotropic borophene to a square quasi-isotropic one. It is shown that the lattice thermal conductivity and mechanical properties along armchair and zigzag directions of monolayer borophenes can be tuned and equalized by changing the pore nanoarchitecture. This work unveils the potential of pore engineering in multiple length scales for tuning the anisotropic thermo-mechanical properties of monolayer borophenes and 2D nanomaterials, such as phosphorene, to develop nanodevices with a desired multifunctional performance.